Category: Parliamentary Politics

Across the country, Labour councils are putting Labour values into action in a way that makes a real difference to millions of people. It is a proud Labour record, and each and every Labour councillor deserves our heartfelt thanks for the work they do.

In the lead up to last night’s decision by Haringey Labour council to go ahead with the transfer of £2 billion of land and assets, including thousands of council homes, into the hands of international property developers Lendlease, Aditya Chakrabortty, who has been following the Haringey Development Vehicle, and who is the best of the journalists writing on housing at the Guardian, published an article highly critical of Haringey and other Labour councils implementing social cleansing through estate privatisation and demolition.

In response he was widely attacked on Twitter by Labourites, whose spluttering objections can be narrowed down to the one that indignantly demanded: ‘How is this helping the Labour Party!’ This conforms to everything we’ve been writing not only about the Labour Party’s antagonism to the truth, but it’s belief that the homes and lives of residents it threatens should be sacrificed to its electoral success. Apparently Chakrabortty was also told that the Haringey council leadership regard him as a ‘one man left wing Daily Mail’ (welcome to our world, Aditya: at least they didn’t denounce you as a Tory, as they have us). However, in his article Chakrabortty couldn’t refrain from absolving the Leader of the Labour Party from his accusations of corruption.

‘However easy it is for pundits to conflate today’s Labour party with Jeremy Corbyn, to do so ignores the daily experience of people under many Labour councils that are his ideological opposite. Such as the zombie Blairites who run Haringey, and who bear as much resemblance to Corbyn’s Labour as Jive Bunny does to Death Metal.’

It’s a strangely dismissive and overstated comment in an otherwise serious and measured article, and suggests the difficulty Chakrabortty has in believing what he asserts. Is Corbyn really the ‘ideological opposite’ of the Leaders of Labour councils? Is Corbyn’s Labour really Jive Bunny to Claire Kober’s Death Metal? And if so, why has Corbyn consistently refused to condemn the actions not only of Haringey council but of every other Labour council engaged in the social cleansing of working-class communities through estate regeneration schemes?

Did I hear right, or was I making it up? As I stood outside the pub having a fag, the crowd shuffled past, branded like an Olympic team with flags and banners and placards bearing the logos of every Labour-affiliated union and other left-wing group, including several I thought no longer existed. I recognised the tune – it was the opening bars from the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army – but what were the words being sung over the top? Was I imagining it, or were they really chanting ‘Oh, Je-re-my Cor-byn! Oh, Je-re-my Cor-byn!’ over and over again? We’d listened to a couple of speeches outside the BBC, where the People’s Assembly demonstration – titled ‘Tories Out!’ – had assembled, but this was too much. We decided right there and then to abandon any idea of joining the blushing throngs.

Later on in the day we joined Class War in the Chandos off Trafalgar Square for an ill-earned pint. A small commando team had gone off to ambush Jeremy Corbyn in Parliament Square, and when they turned up they told us that while waiting for Corbyn to arrive they had confronted Len McCluskey – the General Secretary of Unite the Union, which pretty much funds the Labour Party – with the record of Labour councils socially cleansing working-class communities from London through council estate privatisation and demolition. He simply turned his back on them, showed not the slightest interest in hearing what they had to say, or even in looking at the posters they held up listing just some of the 155 London council estates threatened by Labour councils.

Later on the Messiah himself had arrived, and rather like Moses parting the Red Sea the crowd had fallen back to let him through. Quick as a flash Lisa Mckenzie of Class War ran up behind him and confronted Corbyn with the same question she had asked McCluskey. It’s a simple question, one we’ve been asking the Labour Leader for two years now, so far without receiving an answer: ‘When are you going to stop Labour councils socially cleansing people out of London?’

A version of this article by long-time ASH member Lolly Oii was first published in the new release of Class War, the most dangerous tabloid in Britain and the only paper that speaks to the working class about working-class struggle. We liked it so much we asked the author if we could publish it on the ASH blog and she said yes. This is one of the best summaries we’ve read about estate demolition, what it’s doing to our communities and who is responsible.

Well, where do we begin to untangle this clusterfuck of an issue? Yes, we know there’s a lot to blame Maggie for – introducing the ‘right to buy’ and blocking any cash generated by sales from being used to build new homes; but under carefully hidden layers there’s a lot more blame that actually falls directly at Labour’s feet. In 1997 Tony Blair and his asset-stripping cartel quietly started dismantling council housing using a two-part mechanism that was carried on by Gordon Brown and is continued to this day by Labour-run town halls.

A few hours after winning the 1997 election, Blair turned up at the Aylesbury Estate in Camberwell to make his inaugural speech (packed full of lies) promising to help the so-called ‘forgotten people’ living on council estates. The only people Blair actually helped were the banks, property developers, housing associations and Oxbridge graduates who dominate council-estate and housing-trust management and policy papers. This privileged elite have asset-stripped our council housing and displaced the working class while making obscene personal fortunes in the process.

On 15 April, 2011, the lies of Blair’s inaugural speech unravel as the demolition of the Heygate Estate, down the road from the Aylesbury in the Elephant and Castle, gets started. 1,212 council homes are destroyed, including those of 189 short-changed leaseholders, scattering a working-class community of over 3,000 to the four winds. Southwark Labour council’s leader, Peter John, sold the 25-acre estate to the notorious global property developers Lendlease for a paltry £50 million. It cost Southwark council £51.44m just to get rid of residents and demolish the buildings! Lendlease will generously be providing a total of 79 homes for social rent. Meanwhile, we suspect the total number of private homes built on the ruins of the Heygate will be quietly nudged up from the currently stated figure of 2,535 to create bigger profits.

So much for Blair’s ‘forgotten people’ speech. What happened at the Heygate – and is now happening at the Aylesbury – was the mass social cleansing of a working-class community by a Labour council. This is being repeated all over London and beyond: handing over publicly-owned land and building homes for the rich to create huge profits for offshore property speculators, the middle class and the wealthy.

Well, it’s brief, and says nothing that hasn’t been said before; so let’s get the housing component of the Labour Party Manifesto – published today under the title For the Many Not the Few – out of the way.

Titled ‘Secure Homes for All’, its focus is on house building, rightly identifying the housing crisis as one of affordability, but wrongly identifying the building of new homes as the solution. To this end the Manifesto promises the by-now familiar figure of 1 million new homes over the next Parliament should Labour be elected to power. And what will a Labour government build? 100,000 council and housing association homes a year, so half the five-year total, just as we have previously been told. And what will those homes be? For ‘genuinely affordable rent or sale.’

Let’s just pause here. Housing associations are not government run so half of these homes – in the absence of precise figures let’s say 50,000 per year – will be built by them to fit their requirements as private companies; though no doubt they will continue to receive the considerable subsidies they currently receive from central government agencies like the Homes and Communities Agency that the Manifesto promises to overhaul. So will a Labour government only provide those subsidies for the building of homes for social rent? The manifesto doesn’t say, and in the absence of any indication to the contrary we must assume housing associations will continue to receive public subsidies for building homes for affordable rent or sale at up to 80 per cent of market rate, for London living rent at a third of the borough’s average household income (so £680 per month per person in the borough of Haringey, £770 in Hackney, £895 in Lambeth, £950 in Southwark, and £1,170 in Tower Hamlets), for 25 per cent shared ownership, for shared equity, and anything else they can think of to supplant the council homes for social rent housing associations are either privatising or demolishing and building in their place. Indeed, ‘affordable’ is the only tenancy type and rental level the manifesto mentions.

ASH has been told a lot recently – by people we know and by people we’ve never met – that ‘Now is not the time to be criticising the Labour Party!’ When is it ever in the eyes of Labour supporters? But the particular argument for not doing so now – as it is every time a general election is called – is that inspiring political call to arms: ‘At least we’re not the Tories!’ Now, at ASH we believe in doing our own thinking, whether about estate demolition or the political parties canvassing for residents’ votes; so let’s start by taking a look at this widely claimed difference between the Labour and Conservative parties. Here, in its own words, are the current aims and values of the Labour Party as laid out in Clause IV of the Labour Party Rule Book 2017:

1. The Labour Party is a democratic socialist Party. It believes that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone, so as to create for each of us the means to realise our true potential and for all of us a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many not the few; where the rights we enjoy reflect the duties we owe and where we live together freely, in a spirit of solidarity, tolerance and respect.

2. To these ends we work for:

A. A Dynamic Economy serving the public interest, in which the enterprise of the market and the rigour of competition are joined with the forces of partnership and co-operation to produce the wealth the nation needs and the opportunity for all to work and prosper with a thriving private sector and high-quality public services where those undertakings essential to the common good are either owned by the public or accountable to them

B. A Just Society, which judges its strength by the condition of the weak as much as the strong, provides security against fear, and justice at work; which nurtures families, promotes equality of opportunity, and delivers people from the tyranny of poverty, prejudice and the abuse of power.

This is Helen Hayes, until Parliament was dissolved the Labour MP for Dulwich and West Norwood, speaking (you can listen to her here) against the Conservative government’s Housing and Planning Bill at a march organised by Lambeth Housing Activists on 30 January, 2016. Nice, isn’t she? Well, take a closer look.

Before being elected a Member of Parliament in May 2015, Hayes was a senior partner at Allies & Morrison, an architecture and planning company which, during her partnership, was part of the consortium that demolished the Heygate estate, resulting in the loss of over a thousand council homes and the social cleansing of an entire working class community from the Elephant & Castle neighbourhood. The Oxford-educated Hayes’ specialism at Allies & Morrison was planning, and between 2010 and 2015 she was also a Southwark Labour councillor, a conflict of interest shared by many of the people responsible for selling the Heygate land to property developers Lendlease in 2010 for a loss of £30.5 million. Allies & Morrison also drew up the supplementary planning documents for the Brixton Arches that recommended to Lambeth Labour council that they be ‘regenerated’ by Network Rail, resulting in the eviction of the traders and the closure of the market for the next two years. And as the 35% Campaign has documented, her company has been involved in numerous other dodgy regeneration projects in Southwark and Lambeth. In 2015, when Hayes resigned from Allies & Morisson to take up her place in Westminster, she received capital growth payments totaling £71,443.

The widely held view that the result of the coming general election is a foregone conclusion has really brought out the desperation in the so-called radical left. We’ll leave aside the dreamers who have supported Jeremy Corbyn through his 18 months of indecision, inactivity and failure; but even those who have opposed Labour on everything from its vote to bomb Syria to its council estate demolition programme can now be heard calling for variations on the ‘lesser of two evils’ argument – as if this were anything new. In reality this is the only political argument Labour has ever put forward: ‘Vote for us or you’ll get the Tories!’ Since everyone knows that Labour hasn’t got a chance in hell of winning this election, Labour supporters from Ken Loach to Paul Mason now have the added comfort of believing that Corbyn is some sort of reincarnation of Clement Attlee, and that if only – by some magic – an electorate that has increasingly turned its back on him suddenly turns around and votes him into power, the Parliamentary Labour Party that has done everything it can to oust Corbyn from the leadership will suddenly – and equally miraculously – transform itself into the Party of Aneurin Bevan and build Jerusalem in England’s grey and mortgaged land.